With the rise of digital photography and a fall in photographic film sales, Eastman Kodak was forced to file for bankruptcy protection in January 2012. Twitter feeds and Facebook groups jarred against the specialists wheeled out to mourn the passing of an analogue icon. Could this coverage be taken as representative of wider tensions shaping various areas of current cultural production? As the ghosts of an analogue past come to haunt a digital present, forms of nostalgia loom large in some quarters, while the optimistic claims made for new technologies are subject to increasing scrutiny.

Issue 18 examines these issues in relation to a wide variety of practices. Stretching from art photography to mobile phone apps, museums to social networking sites, this issue sees Photoworks maintain its commitment to exploring a wide and varied photographic landscape. Folios of by artists Burkhard von Harder and Farhad Ahrarnia rework the image fragments of historical practices. Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs explore the possibilities of manipulation without Photoshop and Doug Ashford revisits images of protest from 1967 using the visual forms of modernist abstraction. Commissioned texts by Sarah James, Charlotte Cotton, Rose Issa and Claire Grace add context to these projects.

This is our first issue to feature a work commissioned specifically for the magazine, with a piece by Julie Cockburn. An image-text work by Svetlana Boym draws the industrial landscape and post-industrial technology together in unlikely combinations, while Sandra Plummer, Harriet Riches and Duncan Woodridge examine photography's 'new materiality'. Stephanie Schwarz interviews Jorg Ribalta about his efforts to rethink histories of modernism, and Stephen Duncombe discusses the work of documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, following a recent exhibition in New York. Tensions between analogue and digital are unpicked in Marvin Heiferman's examination of www.dearphotograph.com and Stephen Bull's reflection on the peculiar phenomena of 'retro'photography apps. Robert Rowland-Smith considers the nostalgic draw of family photographs, and how it can be transformed through digital imaging, while Tot Taylor revisits aspects of 2011's Analog exhibition at Riflemaker. Our usual range of book reviews - including Steidl’s timely publication, The Kodak Girl, complete the issue.

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